Ritual of the Broken (Haunted Hearts)

Chapter 2

Chapter

Two

Z achary O’Brien held the cocktail napkin still pinched between his thumb and forefinger as he stepped out of the Second City Saloon onto North Halsted. An oddly warm night for early October in Chicago, and it made him smile.

Yolanda had given him the napkin on account he lost his phone that last time he got arrested. She’d scribbled down her number, her lips tight, her hand moving in jerky, stunted motions like she knew this was a bad idea.

“Nobody does this anymore,” she had said. “Nobody puts their number down on cocktail napkins.” Still, she handed it over to him, scissored between her two fingers with a resigned look on her face. Even disappointed, she was still pretty to him. She still made him feel bashful around her. He wanted this time to work, even after everything they’d been through.

For the first time in a long time, walking out of a bar, he wasn’t drunk. The last time Zach drank, he blacked out and woke up in a jail cell, which, honestly, wasn’t the first time that had happened. But that last time, he lost his phone. The cocktail napkin was all he had, a treasure map with gold at the end. “I’m done. No more getting drunk or high. It’s gonna stick this time,” he told Yolanda.

And it was. He was going to clean up this time.

A breeze raked his shaggy hair. The constant buzz of voices, rumbling cars, and honking horns punctuated the urban racket as Zach zipped up his hoodie and pulled up the hood as he emerged from the doorway of the Second City Saloon. It was a well-known haunt nestled between an upscale restaurant and a boutique store in the heart of Lincoln Park, a low-key joint, the kind of place where everyone knew everyone.

Zach was always the happy drunk, everybody’s buddy, the guy in on the joke. He was the first one to suggest rounds to celebrate, the one holding up his glass to toast, the one with the loudest laughter. Everybody loved Zach. Everybody wanted a Zach as a party buddy in their life.

But not everybody agreed with him.

Apparently, after two drunk-and-disorderly arrests on his record, even the Chicago PD failed to recognize him as just one of the guys out to have a little fun. A busted-out storefront window, which gave him two months in county, meant it was time for a wakeup call.

That meant this time Zach wasn’t at the bar to drink. He hadn’t been back to the Second City Saloon in weeks, and it was the first time he saw the wary glances and squinty-eyed stares on people’s faces when he entered. The eye rolls as people wrapped fingers around their drinks or threw back a slug of their beer. As he passed the bar, Johnny even leaned over and said to Bill, “Stay away from that one. He’s got a frequent flyer card at the local district.”

He wanted to say something, to tell them it was only twice. Maybe a couple more in a drunk tank. And there might have been a bar fight or two where he was questioned. They tried to pin him with a charge of carrying ‘drug paraphernalia,’ as they called it, but that was in with a lawyer, a public defender guy. Then they had a bogus charge of possession of narcotics. But that was it. He had troubles. That much he knew. But he was different now.

This time at the bar, his goal was to make amends to as many of them as he could. That’s the step he was on. And he’d come in especially to see his ex-girlfriend, Yolanda, who managed the place.

It didn’t go over with a lot of them as well as he hoped, but it was better than his worst expectations. There were a lot of nodding heads and skeptical stares, but he proved to them he had the balls to accept the things he could not change and to embrace the things he could. Exactly like the Serenity Prayer said.

And Yolanda gave him her new number. Which he thought might be her old number, but he couldn’t remember, because who remembers phone numbers these days?

So now, all that was left for him to do was to go home and do more of what he’d been doing for the past forty- seven days. Not drink. Not do anything. Sit there and watch the TV and sip a plain old pop or something.

The muffled music from the bar fell away into the hum and windy rush of the city. And, he had to admit, the October night air was different. A good kind of different because the world stood crystal clear.

He turned and began walking down the street, hands in his jeans pockets, moving with the crowd but not of the crowd. Most of these people were just starting their night. College students from nearby DePaul looking for drinks and dates. After-work stiffs taking a load off the day. And people like how he used to be, the people seeking that elusive something at the bottom of a whiskey bottle or in the smoke from a glass pipe. His history was a complex web of errors and remorse, a chain of poor choices that had robbed him of companions and romantic connections and now left him with a criminal record.

This Zach was trying to do better, trying to prove to her—and maybe to himself—that he could change. He went to the meetings and started the long process of confronting the demons of his past one day at a time. This evening was progress. He remained sober, even declining when someone offered to buy him a drink, prompting a look of confused astonishment.

Not to say he wasn’t tempted. He wanted to crawl over the bar top to claw at one of those whiskey shots as the bartender poured them. He could smell them: a tantalizing, full-bodied scent that carried over the wood to his nose and made his whole goddamn mouth water like a hungry mastiff.

But he resisted. This was the new Zach. He held his head high. He’d walked through fire and come out the other side. Tonight, Zach carried himself with an unfamiliar gait—he walked like a sober man. His steps were firm, his mind set on a course of making amends. He was traveling on a new path of atonement.

And maybe he was a little proud.

Turning away from the bar-lined main road, Zach decided to take a different route to his usual L stop. He wanted a quieter walk, so he ambled down a residential street, flanked by buildings bathed in the hazy glow of sporadic street lamps. The city’s pulsating rhythm became a distant hum, replaced by the whisper of a sudden cool breeze rustling through leaves and the occasional yowl of a stray cat.

As he trudged along the cracked pavement, a prickle of unease skittered up his spine. Subtle at first; a phantom of sound he couldn’t quite place. Then it grew, a seed of dread growing like a virus, making the hairs at the nape of his neck stand on end. It was a pair of unseen eyes boring into him, an invisible presence that prowled behind. He even stopped and peered around, jumping as someone closed a front door somewhere and turned off their porch light.

Quickening his pace, he turned into an alleyway to make his way back to civilization again and get to the L stop quicker. He could still hear the city. That should be a comfort. Distant horn honks, the rattle of a far-off L train, raccoons screeching over scraps of food. And the scuff of his own boots bouncing off graffiti-covered brick walls and wooden fences lining the alley.

It all sounded sinister to him. That sense of being watched… it was like whatever followed him was right there .

At a crossroads in the alley, he took a quick turn and made a prompt decision to head west, figuring he could cut over through the side streets over to Sheffield and catch his usual Red Line train at Belmont. He walked faster, fast enough his legs ached, casting quick glances behind him for something that clearly wasn’t there.

It wasn’t . Nothing was there, he told himself.

Maybe it was all in his head. Maybe this was a paranoid side effect of him drying out or his addiction trying to get him to go back and make bad choices again.

No. Stop !

This was getting too real. This was his mind losing control.

He did stop and leaned up against a brick wall. He forced himself to take a deep breath and blow it out. They did that sometimes in the meetings when people got too worked up telling their story. Take a deep breath. Give yourself some grace.

After a moment, the thudding of his heart seemed to slow. There, that was better. Careful, controlled breaths and a few gulps of air, he started walking normally again.

But as soon as he took a step, the feeling of being pursued flooded back. Somehow, the alleyway seemed darker, more narrow.

Zach broke into a run, his heart drumming in his ears, pounding against his ribs, his breath coming out in ragged gasps.

If he turned around, it would have him. Whatever it was, it would grab him. That much he knew. It was inevitable.

If he looked back, it would become real. So he just ran.

And ran. And ran some more, shoes slapping against the pavement, his breath hitching in his throat.

He should have come to a street by now. But all that stretched before him was the alleyway. Doubled over, hands on his knees, he tugged at his hood to pull it down. He couldn’t run anymore.

This was not how Chicago worked. Chicago was a fairly ordered city with roads pretty much going north-south and east-west. Alleys divided the blocks, but the main streets were typically visible from one end of the alley to the next. He’d been in these alleys before. A couple times, he even woke up in them. If they turned into another alley, that street should be seen. But all he could see as he peered in what he assumed was north and then south were miles-long stretches of alleyway. No end in sight. He couldn’t see over the tall fences. Peeking through the slats only yielded darkness. Lights weren’t on other than the sporadic street lights or a garage light over a door .

Trash cans butted up against a dirty brick wall. Maybe if he could climb on top…

He checked one of them, a sturdy-looking plastic bin he hoped could hold his weight that he shoved hard against a wooden fence. He could climb over and make his way into someone’s backyard, then cut through to one of the residential roads to figure out where he was. This whole nightmare done.

But as he put a knee on top of the garbage bin, he caught movement out of the side of his eye. He turned in that direction.

Nothing.

No. There. A figure under the halo of a far-off streetlamp. A fleeting silhouette, a shadow that flickered in and out of sight, edges blurry and indistinct.

Maybe his eyes were playing tricks.

One moment, he was sure he saw something, a figure more solid than the night around it. The next it was gone, only to reappear a heartbeat later.

Then it moved into the light, a wraith-like dark specter of wispy smoke, vaguely human but also not.

Zach fell backward, causing the garbage bin to topple beneath him. His back slammed hard onto the concrete.

Winded but with no time to worry about it, Zach scrambled to his feet and started running.

He was being hunted. That’s what this was. He was the prey, a hapless creature being herded into a trap.

The alley only gave way to more alleys. Walls closed in on him, the path ahead stretching with no end in sight. He took turns, left and right, but each bend only led to more of the same. The once-solid brick and concrete reality of Chicago’s Lincoln Park had warped into a surreal, sinister caricature of back alleyways.

The air around him grew dense. His chest tightened.

The figure was still behind him, seemingly moving no faster, but still just as close.

His breaths came out in ragged gasps, and sweat poured down his face. His legs burned, but fear made him ignore it.

And still, the dark figure, pursued him.

A demon. What else could it be? Zach O’Brien, a man who had fought his inner demons, found himself ensnared by a real one. The whole absurd situation almost made him bark a laugh.

Maybe he actually had lost his mind. Maybe he was still in a jail cell, sleeping off a bender, and the past few months were some dream now turned into a nightmare.

Zach turned a corner and stopped. He had no choice. The alleyway terminated at a brick wall.

He turned. The creature still moved toward him, not touching the ground but floating above it. There was nowhere left to go. So, he ran to the brick wall and tried desperately to leverage himself into a corner to climb up.

His fingers clawed at the weathered rust-brown brick, searching for handholds. He tried to catch the edge of his shoe on a rough outcropping. But it was too small, impossible to climb. Still, he scrabbled for purchase against the rough surface, jumping and scraping against the brick. His efforts were rewarded only with scraped palms, shredded fingernails, and fresh fear.

Looking up, he realized the streetlamp’s glow faded and flickered. He turned and faced the dark figure. It stood at least seven feet tall, a shadow, no features on its face. Not like how he expected a demon to look.

Zach’s breath hitched. He pushed himself to stand up against the hard brick wall. If he was going to die, at least he was going to do it standing.

“What do you want?” Zach yelled.

It answered by moving toward him slowly. Agonizingly slow.

And then it was gone.

Zach’s gaze flitted around, peering into the yawning dark of the unsettlingly silent gaps between the trash bins. But there was nothing.

Silence. A silence that stretched on for seconds and still more.

Just the thrum of his nerves and the thud of his heart.

That’s all this was. He gulped and even let out a small, uncertain laugh at himself. He was fine. It was all fine. His mind could make up horrors. It had before when he mixed stuff with his liquor, a pill or maybe a line, sometimes a little smoke. Maybe that is really all it was, an aftereffect, a lingering withdrawal brought on by revisiting his old haunts, remembering that life he was trying hard to leave.

He took a deep breath, calmed himself, and moved from the wall toward the mouth of the dead end. He’d be through soon enough .

A roar shattered the night. Zach found himself shoved, face-first, to the rough, broken ground.

He barely had time to register it before a pain erupted across his right arm, sharp and searing, that left him gasping. The creature gripped him by the upper arm and turned him over onto his back so that he was forced to stare up into the face of something he couldn’t make sense of.

A shadow coalesced in the darkness above him, its form solidifying from the murk. And now he could make out a face, its features blurry and indistinct. But its eyes... its eyes were bright and piercing, a vile shade of red, glowing with an unholy light.

The creature leaned closer. Zach braced for a foul, deathly stench. But instead, he was met with an unexpected odor of citrus and an earthy undertone like pine sap—a surprising, distracting scent—at least until the creature opened its mouth and let out a low, guttural growl.

Then, with a violent jerk, the entity ripped into him. Agony lanced through him like a white-hot bolt. He screamed, his voice raw and broken, as the creature devoured him.

He looked down at himself, expecting to see his own blood, his inner parts. But all he saw was the creature’s dark hand plunged into his chest, pulling out a flickering flame which siphoned out into the mouth of the creature.

His vision darkened and his strength faded. This creature consumed his soul, his very essence, drawn out, pulled like a shroud from his body. Its light weakened, becoming a wisp of light consumed by the entity. His consciousness waned, his mind spiraling into the black abyss.

His last sensation was of a chilling emptiness. No bright light, no loved ones easing his transition. Just a hollow void.